Pajiba Turns Two; 14 More Years Until We’re ‘Legal’ (10 in Arkansas)!
Gratuitous Self-Congratulation / Dustin Rowles
Miscellaneous | June 19, 2006 | Comments (35)
For those of you who revel in birthday celebrations, Pajiba turns two years old today — in Freudian terms, we are entering our anal stage (finally) and, according to Piagetian theory, we will begin displaying egocentrism any day now (ha!). Pajiba quietly came into existence on June 20, 2004, unspectacularly introducing our first reviews (Secret Window and Mean Girls), repurposed from another online publication for which Jeremy was already a critic and, for the first month online, I used the pseudonym Will Declan for reasons I still can’t properly explain. In the subsequent 24 months, we’ve managed to pen around 450 reviews, introduce a political section that we later thought better of, write a few book and CD reviews (that also met a quick death as we tightened our focus), welcome the TV Whore, fortuitously stumble upon an amazing critic, piss off some guy at Revolution Studios, lose the entire contents of Pajiba to the Department of Homeland Security, upgrade servers twice to handle the traffic, anger Middle America, shit upon one of the nation’s most popular bloggers, draft a co-worker with a like-minded fondness for profanity and polysyllabic words, dazzle the world with our Ten Worst Blockbusters of All Time, win praise from the producers of last year’s best film, and otherwise alienate one reader for every two we gain. Indeed, when Jeremy and I started the site two years ago as a small vanity project, we never actually expected an audience beyond a few people who stumbled across our site searching for alternate spellings to the female anatomy — now, of course, we’re on the cusp of Hasselhoffian levels of world domination.
We don’t really have anything special planned to mark the occasion — we’ve never been about contests or giveaways and, besides, when we decided early on to eschew advanced screenings and the PR folks who set them up, we also gave up any hope of collecting DVDs, T-Shirts, and other movie-related memorabilia to offer our readers in exchange for answering obscure items of trivia. In the end, however, we feel that it was a fair trade-off — there was little likelihood we would stay in the good graces of Disney’s PR folks for long, anyway and, for us, it’s easier to schedule around our regular workweek knowing that Fridays will always be “review day” around the “offices” of Pajiba.com.
However, in celebration of our anniversary, we will be introducing another column to our rotation starting tomorrow. Henceforth, once every two weeks one of our illustrious critics will freestyle on the topic of his choice. “Pajiba’s Guide to What’s Good for You” will explore the big and small screens in ways we’ve heretofore been unable, covering our favorite and least favorite movies, directors, actors, actresses, and writers from the past and the present without the limitations of a box-office release schedule or TV listings. It will also give us a chance to review notable classics of both the illustrious and excremental variety, appeasing those of you who would like a little historical context added to our pages.
While the trade round-up and the new column will continue indefinitely, reviews will remain the focus of the site, and we will continue to discourage our beloved readers from watching almost everything that enters theaters or appears on your plasma screens, with writing that attempts (and often fails) to be both profane and erudite. And, as always, we will remain one of the few review websites that allows for comments, giving our readers an opportunity to mock and ridicule the Pajiba critics in much the same way we delight in excoriating our pop-culture targets. It’s only fair.
Thanks to all of our readers who have kept us around for two years.
Best,
Dustin Rowles
Publisher
Comments
Posted by: Jenn at June 20, 2006 9:23 AM
The first comment? This is a big responsiblty...
*Ahem...tap, tap is the mike on? Testing? Ah.
I would like to extend the inaugural thanks for the scathing, bitchy, wonderful and amazingly spot-on reviews you all sweat blood for every week. Every Friday you take the bullet for the rest of us, just so we save an extra ten bucks and blow coffee across our computer screens over such gems as "presenting like a mantis". And maybe, sometimes, induce a few of us to part with a ten dollars we hadn't planned on spending, just because you guys told that this time it was worth it.
I know I'm looking forward to an "Ode to Fight Club" in the new segment.
Thanks for everything!
-- A faithful Middle American reader
(You know you love us. Don't fight it.)